Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
FOREST
Iawake with a groan. An icy breeze whispers over my naked skin, and I reach for the covers to pull them over my body.
They’re just as quickly ripped back away.
I raise myself to my elbows to find Tucker circling back to an easel he has perched next to the window with a paintbrush held between his teeth.
His facial hair has grown out as he readies himself for winter.
It’s not a full beard, but there’s enough scruff to keep him moderately warm.
He grabs the brush, swirls it on a palette of skin-colored hues, and strokes it on the canvas.
What he’s painting, I cannot see, but I’ve awoken enough times from slumber to find him just like this to know he’s painting me.
He always says I’m his favorite muse, and I always counter that I’m his only muse.
He particularly likes to paint me when I’m sleeping because it’s killing two birds with one stone—making art and watching after me.
He carries himself through each day like a man on a tight wire waiting for the next fall.
No matter how many times I try to get through to him that the masked men stopped showing up the day of my crowning, he doesn’t listen.
He watches and waits for them to come back.
He swears there are three of them, each with a different mask representing the three forces of the Wilds—the raven, the wolf, and the fish.
I counter that it doesn’t matter if they decide not to show up anymore.
“Tucker,” I groan, reaching for the blanket. “It’s freezing.”
“I’m almost done.” He struts the brush over the canvas with an intensity I’ve grown accustomed to, that I’ve grown fond of.
He’s a brutal man with a penchant for violence I’ve never quite experienced and yet, at his core, he’s an artist. “Can you move your cock to the right just a little bit? I need to see your balls.”
I roll my eyes and adjust my flaccid cock, shifting it just enough so that its shadow hangs over my balls. “I’m shrinking by the second here.”
He laughs quietly—he’s much quieter these days. Less combative. Some would say he’s learned his place and has fallen back in line. I think he just needed someone around to soften him around the edges a little bit.
In the five months since he showed me his art room with a nervous smile, I’ve learned a lot about the both of us.
More accurately, I’ve remembered so much about our shared past. His art lives and breathes like fogroot-infused memories, taking me to places and feelings long forgotten.
Still, no matter how much I force myself to try, I cannot claim his memories of us together as the truth.
I go to that room almost every day and stare at the paintings of us, and nothing ever clicks.
Tucker drops the frayed brush into a cup of water, takes a measured step back, and pushes his jeans down his thighs. His cock is purple at the head and leaking pre-cum. I’m mesmerized by this part of the ritual every time
In the moments when reality seems so far away, I wonder if his seed is magic. As if smearing it on the canvases imbues his art with the magical ability of seeing into the past.
He pumps his cock furiously, his knuckles turning white. No spit. No lube. Just the salty slickness of precum greasing his shaft. He arches forward, his shoulders pulling taut as he empties himself into his hand.
I grab the blanket and wrap it around my naked body as I stand and approach. He smears his hand over the background of the photo on both sides, covering his flesh in a mixture of white paint and whiter cum.
In the painting, I lie asleep not on a bed but on a blanket of snow.
Dreaming peacefully with my hard cock reddened against my pale stomach.
I rest my head on his shoulder and examine all the finer details of his latest piece of art.
A raven sits at my side, its gaze angled on something hidden off the edge of the canvas.
“I couldn’t sleep last night.” Tucker pulls up his jeans and wipes his hands on the denim. “I looked out the window and saw the first snowfall, and it made me think of how hard things are about to get.”
Outside, it’s a winter wonderland. Snow covers the ground as far as the eye can see, and the branches on every tree are iced and heavy, dripping with hardened snow. It’d be beautiful if winter itself wasn’t so violent.
The dining room has been repurposed in the last few months. There’s still a large table, but it seats ten instead of twenty-three. The lighting has been updated with a brass chandelier hung over the table.
Tucker finishes his breakfast of sausage and eggs and pushes the plate to the side. He gulps down a tall glass of water and scoots his chair back. “I’m going to go check to see if Bash has returned from town yet.”
“If he’s not back by tomorrow night, someone is going to have to go search for him.”
He nods as he stands. “Nobody else is trained for that.”
I point a finger at myself. “I know the outside world.”
He shakes his head defiantly. “You’re too important to risk it.”
“Risk what?” I sneer and the truth settles in my gut. “You don’t trust me to come back.”
“You don’t have the best track record.” He grabs a fur coat off the wall and slings it over his shoulders. “Besides, remember when you told me you tried to leave and ended up right back at the top of the mountain? The Wilds don’t want you to leave.”
“The Wilds…” I clear my throat and sigh. “The Wilds understand that our survival in the winter months relies on the outside world. If push comes to shove, the fog won’t be a problem.”
“Yeah,” he groans. “We’ll cross that bridge when we have to. For now, we wait for Bash to come back.”
He storms out of the dining room. The front door slams shut soon after.
Only two men are ever allowed to leave, and it’s always the same two.
They’re trained specifically for missions into town to forage for food and supplies that we don’t have the ability to harvest or make here.
It’s funded by bringing in new recruits who swear off the outside world in return for a home here.
They give up everything they have and hand over all the money.
One or two new recruits a year are enough to keep this place running.
The problem is without my father actively recruiting, we haven’t had a new recruit in months. It doesn’t appear as if that’s going to change anytime soon.
Bash, who is currently missing in action, is the only person currently capable of going on the missions.
The other is Tony, the other trained man and Zeva’s husband, who is currently nursing a serious illness that has persisted for two weeks.
He is quarantined in a cabin on the outskirts of the village.
I push away my plate of food, no longer hungry.
The cold hatred of winter came fast. Thirty-degree temperatures switched up in a flash, and now it feels closer to zero degrees outside.
A lit cigarette dangles from my dry, chapped lips, the cherry at the end sizzling with every inhale.
I unclench my arms from around my body and grab the cigarette, ash it, and place it back between my lips.
I hug my arms around my chest, gripping as tight as I can to try to keep the heat trapped inside my fur coat.
I’m down to two cigarettes, which at my current rate of smoking, means I’ll be out of them in two days’ time.
Smoking is forbidden here, but fortunately for me, I don’t have to abide by those rules.
Tucker hates when I smoke and threatens to tattle on me, but who the fuck is he going to rat to?
Bash brings me back two packs every time he goes out and in return, I let him sneak in porno magazines. It’s a win-win.
My father would not be thrilled by the lax standards I rule this place with. But he’s dead, so he can stay shutting the fuck up.
I grab the butt of the cigarette and take a long drag, reveling in the way the smoke burns at the back of my throat. I let the smoke sit for a bit before exhaling and watching the clouds of warm breath and hotter smoke dance together in circles before me.
“Forest,” Zeva screams from ahead.
I toss the cigarette into the snow and stomp it out as she approaches, running at full speed. She comes to a stop right ahead of me, bent over and grabbing her knees.
“What’s wrong?” I question, taking her by the hand. “Is it Bash?”
“No,” she stammers. “It’s my mother. I think she’s dying.”
Camilla lies in the bed in her bedroom, the room lit only by a single sconce on the wall.
“She had a slight fever last night.” Zeva says quietly. She stands beside me with one hand covering her mouth and the other held firm on her hip. “I came to check on her about thirty minutes ago and found her on the floor.”
“And you helped her into bed?” I don’t love that these are the questions I have to ask, but my job is to protect this place. “Why would you do that?”
“She’s my mother,” she shrieks. “I’m not going to leave her on the floor.”
Being the leader isn’t easy. It often means making decisions I’d rather not make. It means thinking with my head instead of my heart. It’s a constant battle between the two, but Zeva has already lost so much, so I settle on empathy. I reach out to the side and massage a hand over her back.
“Are you absolutely sure this isn’t the same illness that’s befallen Tony?”
She pinches the bridge of her nose. “I can’t know for certain, but it doesn’t appear to be. He went downhill over the course of a week, and even now, he’s awake and alert.”
I purse my lips, contemplating. “Are you willing to take that chance?”
“What other option do I have?” She takes a seat on a chair beside the bed and takes her mother’s frail hand into her own. “You can quarantine me with her if that’s what you need to do.”
“I don’t want to do that,” I scoff. “I just don’t know if I have a choice.
” I scratch my forehead and sigh. Tucker was right.
This winter is going to be hard. It’ll be all that much harder without Camilla here, who alone holds the secrets to all things medicine.
She’s taught Tucker some of it, but not nearly enough.
There is no other choice but for her to wake up. “Can you give her Nirvana?”
She shoots me a glare. “You want me to force her into a coma?”
“I don’t know,” I stammer. “I’m not a fucking doctor, and it’s not a coma.
It’s a deep sleep which probably sounds like it’s the same, but I don’t think it is.
She’s old, she’s frail, and not to be too blunt, we won’t survive without her.
I think maybe she has a better chance of fighting this fever if her body is…
” How the fuck do I say this? “If her body can focus solely on recovering.”
She bows her head into her hands and sobs. “Why didn’t she teach me any of this?”
That’s a good fucking question, Zeva. You should ask her if she wakes up.
I’m not going to tell her what Camilla once told me about why she chose not to teach her own children the ways of the wilderness.
In my head, the math isn’t mathing, but I’ve never been good at math, so what the fuck do I know.
What I do know, what I sense, is that shit is about to spiral out of control.
I’m going to need a hell of a lot more cigarettes.